Fern Petrie
Flights of Fancy
7 – 22 March 2013
Flights of Fancy is a
whimsical peek into the world of childhood fantasy unbridled by science or
logic. In childhood imagination is given full reign. Like the lifespan of a
butterfly this is an all too brief moment in life but an awe-inspiringly
beautiful one. In childhood we reach beyond ourselves and embellish everyday
existence until imaginary friends share our dreams, pets take on human
characteristics and a simple box of costumes can transform the lowliest child
into a Knight Templar or the Tsar of Russia. To dress in the costumes of
countries, don masks and slip into animal suits (much like the transitions in
many fairy tales), the young imagination explores other lives and other worlds
with their fantasy companions.
In this exhibition I have
chosen three Victorian and Edwardian children’s texts to represent the
importance of external influences in the construction of imaginary worlds. Chums
is an illustrated boys annual from 1808 full of who-dunnits, brain teasers and
stories of the colonies, The Captain’s
Children describes the adventures of a group of children who travel to
Brazil and find delightful talking birds and magical places and Perrault’s Fairy Tales is comprised of
such loved stories as Little Red Riding Hood and The Frog Prince. Each of these
books represent the joys of generations of readers, thousands of little minds
all over the world who have been touched by the written word and made them
their own.
I decided on such early
children’s literature to correspond with the Victorian cabinet cards on which
my works are based. Cabinet cards were posed Victorian photographs where a
multitude of props and costumes were utilized to give an overall impression of
how the sitter desired to be represented. Roughly painted and sometimes
clumsily draped backdrops, pieces of furniture and symbolic items were all
grouped together to create this treasured memento. In my collection I wish to reveal the
constructed world of the imagination not as a cohesive whole, rather as a
series of items tacked together from disparate sources assembled in a staged
still to represent the mind of the child or children in question. There are also a select number of images
which deal with the effect of these early influences upon the adult mind. ‘The
Resurrected Heart’ and ‘Queen for a Day’ both talk about the idea of true love;
a concept which as young children we first encounter in fairy tales, but which takes
on a more dramatic complexity when faced in real life.
Lastly the idea of
collecting memories and storing them away for posterity can be viewed in the
framed butterflies and moths which have been meticulously varnished and then
drawn upon with pen and ink. They rest upon the covers of the volumes stated
above and along with two scorpions are small treasures which bridge the gap
between the real and the imagined, moving outside of time just as the images of
the Victorian children in their newly acquired dream worlds have done beside
them.
